By Ted Elrick

Oliver Stone running through a scene from Any Given Sunday with actors Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz.
(Photo: Robert Zuckerman © 1999 Warner Bros.)

Recently, Warner Bros. Home Video released The Oliver Stone Collection on DVD. The collection features many of Stone's films supplemented by numerous extras including director's commentaries on each. The collection is available in either a ten-film set or six-film set containing such titles as Any Given Sunday, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street and The Doors. In addition, both sets contain a bonus disc featuring a documentary by Charles Kiselyak, Oliver Stone's America, as well as Stone's student film Last Year in Vietnam. Missing from the collection are Platoon and Salvador which will be released as special editions by MGM in June.

Stone's films have created considerable controversy, from debate over his portrayal of the Kennedy assassination to a wrongful death action lawsuit brought against Stone and Warner Bros. for Natural Born Killers. The suit was recently dismissed when a Louisiana judge rejected all the plaintiff's claims that the film intended to incite violence.

Nonetheless the controversies about his films are such that a book, Oliver Stone's USA, was recently published by the University of Kansas. The book is a fascinating debate between historians, politicians and scholars such as David Halberstam, Stephen E. Ambrose, George S. McGovern and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. who take Stone to task for elements of his films and Stone who responds to each citing many of the resources that led him to the conclusions he presented in his films.

A filmmaker who generates this much discussion is rare, and DGA Magazine recently caught up with Stone to discuss his films and how the controversies have impacted him as a filmmaker.

Concerning the dismissal of the lawsuit of Natural Born Killers, to Variety you said, "The lawyers told me this is a huge victory, but I don't think so. I sympathize with the Byers family, but it's Sarah Edmondson who shot Patsy Byers. It's depressing that a suit that should have been thrown out on the first pass could result in such a waste of time, energy and money. We've created a new legal hell where everyone is entitled and no one is responsible." Did you ever anticipate that this film would have created this kind of controversy?

No. It became a slowdown in my life because I never expected this to happen. It's like a typical accident like most things in life you never expect. One moment you're driving and the next you're lying on the side of the road with your life going downhill. I was overtaken and surprised by reactions to both JFK and Natural Born Killers because they were almost back to back.

There are many who think you're brilliant, while others think you're full of it. As an artist, how do you feel about such a strong variance of opinion?

I think it's a compliment. I think, at least, it gets their blood boiling. I think that is what film is about. There's a school of French thought led by Antonine Artaud which says, wake 'em up, shake 'em up, surprise me, make me think anew, stir me.

Do you consciously set out to do that?

Oh, no, not at all. I love passion in movies and I put in what I feel is the right amount. Some people feel it's too much, but I do put passion into them. To some people it translates into the ideological, whereas if you probably think it through it isn't really as much, because I do have strains of everything in my films. People talk about me abstractly a lot. The Oliver Stone they talk about is not somebody I recognize that much. It's somebody who exists in the third person and who's not always the same. It's described differently, like the story of the blind men attempting to describe an elephant from what they're touching. It's described differently by certain types who hate certain films or love others. It's really bizarre. It's complicated.

I had to write it. It was not easy. It was time-consuming, but I had to do it because some of the miscomprehensions about what I was trying to do in films was really bugging me. The research we did for each film was enormous.

Because of all the controversies and debates, are you more leery about the projects you embark on now?

Has it affected me? Absolutely. It has hurt my confidence level and my ability to take on some of the big monsters. I don't know if I would be as able to be as outrageous as I was on The Doors or Natural Born Killers today. I was able to operate from a place where I wasn't known. Really, I got known nationally on JFK, and that made it doubly difficult for me to deal with anything. Every time my name came up in a meeting, everyone would have a reaction. I spent a lot of time on a project about Martin Luther King, it wasn't derailed by the media, but the media was not really helpful by announcing that I was making some bogus conspiracy movie before we had a shootable script. I didn't envision it as a conspiracy movie. It was a biography of a character. It was closer to the genre of Nixon than it was to a conspiracy. But it was pictured as that in the media and I don't think that helped us with the studio and the whole concept of the film about Martin Luther King died. The media wasn't the only reason. The script was not satisfactory. But the media didn't help and onerous perceptions become reality.

What do you think a filmmaker's responsibility is to presenting history and ideas?

The responsibility is to your conscience. In that you must reside. In following my conscience, I feel that I have to do as much research as I can, find out as many of the facts as I can, but at a certain point the facts end. You can only get so many facts, perceptions and witnesses. You must leave it all behind and after you've educated yourself you go into the area of intuition and speculation. You're behind closed doors and you're making up dialogue that you think people might be saying. Whether it's between Pat and Richard Nixon, or Jim Morrison, Ron Kovic, Le Ly Hayslip, or another witness telling the story his way. Their perception is different. When people say history is wholly objective and factual, it's nonsense. When you come to something as difficult as the JFK murder, anyone who does any serious amount of reading knows that there's serious contention on so many facts. People have been attacking me for years and most of them don't know what they're talking about. They haven't read one book questioning the Warren Commission. They abide in the great ignorant mainstream fed soothing editorials by the conformist Eastern Establishment.

In 1999 when the Supreme Court allowed the Natural Born Killers lawsuit to proceed, you got a lot of support from the community. Jack Shea and the DGA issued a statement expressing disappointment, saying the Court's action would 'stifle the voice of the creative community.'

What other support did I get? The DGA made the statement and that was very, very thoughtful of Jack Shea and Jay Roth to put that out. I thought that was very supportive. But that's the only support I got. I never heard anything else from the rest of the community at all. Nobody knew about it. The media took the position of mocking the case because of the sensationalist aspect. Vanity Fair did an article, pitting me against John Grisham and it was very light. But I got no support other than from the DGA.

For the most part. In the past there were complete fuckups. Right now, Universal took the cheapest way out on the DVD of Born on the Fourth of July which was shocking to me because the film was stunningly shot by Bob Richardson and we really used anamorphic for the first time, using big lenses in a wild way. We had really freed ourselves up. Yet at the same time we also shot very classic, rigid canvases which were locked into the concept of the wheelchair from a low angle. We lived at a lower level. We concentrated on bringing Tom Cruise to life on his knees so to speak. So it was an interesting movie because it moved through two universes for me. The Norman Rockwell beginning turned into this harsh overlit nightmare in Vietnam, and then it goes into the return home and becomes darker and darker. But it was just ruined in the transfer. It's flat, stale and cheap. The compression was done cheaply.

How much control do you have over that?

None. People outside the business assume we all control these things. They are totally wrong. I do feel an obligation to try to get the money back for the people you make the movie for. It's very important and it's also an honorable thing to do. I believe a film has a long shelf life if it's good, so I always try to build them to last.

I've been able to supervise most of the video transfers, fewer of the DVDs but I've missed a few, among them The Doors when it was first on video and I hated the result. The red on video in those days used to go really magenta. It destroyed the look of the movie. But that was probably the highest-selling version of that movie. It went all over the world. That is the transfer I really regret. I re-did one for DVD, for the master that just came out from Artisan Pictures.

Now is that different from the one that's in the Warner's Collection?

No, that's the version that Artisan is selling individually, but it's also in the Warner's Collection.

It can become confusing. Sometimes the studio has so many ancillary markets, they have to organize their prints so they match. When they ran Any Given Sunday on HBO, they ran the theatrical cut which was fine with me; I approved it. But available to them had been the DVD cut which was the fifth cut of the film. I'm confusing you, but it matters to me. I did a TV cut, an airline cut and a foreign cut because of the football. So I went to every length to make every cut. That also helped me learn more about the film because I had been rushed a little bit. But by the time I had done the TV and airline cuts, then I knew what I wanted to do exactly as far as refinement. So the fifth version is the one HBO didn't show, but it's available on DVD. These are the things fans and buffs know. There can be so many versions of a film, how do you keep track of it? So much is out there that disasters loom all over the place. Where was the transfer done? The lab work? Who did the dubs? It's endless. You could spend your life chasing your work.

The collection of your films really points out how varied your work is, not only in subject matter but also in style. There's no way you can compare Platoon with Natural Born Killers.

I'm glad you noticed. A lot of people don't. There is variety there. We really made some strides. I say "we" because it is a collective. We broke rules in cinematography, production design, acting, cumulatively. You don't look back and say, "Hey, I broke a rule today."

I do now because I appreciate it more in hindsight. I stopped after the tenth year of that madness. I didn't realize it, but I needed to get away. Over the next five years, I was involved in two books, one my novel A Child's Night Dream, completed after 30 years, the other a book of historical essays, two movies (U-Turn and Any Given Sunday), and the preparation of the DVD collection. A project I spent a great deal of preparation time on, Beyond Borders, did not work out. Basically, I had the wrong partners from the start, which makes it a point of poor judgment on my part.

Warren Beatty had a great line when they asked him why he made so few films. He said something like, "Yeah, but do you realize how many great people I've met?" You really do give up a lot when you make movies. So my life was 90% ignored during the ten years when I was constantly working. Now it's been profound to rediscover life, including watching my 5-year-old daughter grow up day by day and two sons becoming teenagers, and a mother reaching the end. When I direct another film, it will be coming from a wholly fresh place for me. In fact, I can say right now I forgot how to direct. But it will come back. It's like swimming in some ways.

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